Technologies exist in the prior art for detecting audio incidents that breach the peace such as a shooting, an explosion, a blast, etc. Typically, audio detectors that are deployed throughout a geographic area report sensed data to a central station. The information reported by the audio detector(s) is processed and the central station determines whether a relevant audio incident occurred, such as a shooting, or, on the other hand, whether the incident represents something benign such as a car back-firing or construction noise. A bona-fide breach-of-the-peace incident is typically reported by the central station to law enforcement authorities to alert first responders and help in an investigation. The location and time of the audio incident are important elements of the incident report.
One operational issue that arises in the prior art is the incidence of errors in accurately classifying the audio incident as benign or otherwise. A benign incident that is wrongly classified as a shooting or other breach-of-the-peace will result in wasted law enforcement and first-responder resources. Conversely, a bona-fide breach-of-the-peace incident that is misclassified as benign can possibly result in loss of life, serious injury, property damage, and delayed justice.
One technique in the prior art attempts to correlate weapon fire incidents with persons of interest and location data in an attempt to identify persons who might have been at the scene of the weapons fire. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,855,935 and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2011/0169633 A1. However, one important deficiency of these prior art techniques is that they lack precision in identifying people who might have witnessed or even perpetrated the incident, and, as a result, tend to be overinclusive; this has the unfortunate effect of identifying people who in fact were not present at the scene at the time of the incident or who simply did not hear the incident. Also, as mentioned, these prior art techniques may give rise to false alarms when a benign audio incident is misclassified. Therefore a new approach is needed.